Top White House officials will go to Capitol Hill today to lay out their plan for tax code changes to Republican congressional leaders a day before President Donald Trump is to make his ideas public, according to congressional officials.
Trump's top economic adviser Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will brief House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and the leaders of congressional tax-writing committees -- House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady of Texas and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah.
Trump's announcement that he would roll out a tax plan Wednesday came as a surprise to congressional leaders and key figures in the tax debate.
The tax plan release will come in the middle of a busy week, in which the White House and congressional leaders are working against a Saturday deadline to negotiate a spending deal to avoid a partial shutdown of the federal government. Trump is also pushing House Republicans to restart work on a replacement for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act after the last attempt imploded in March when conservatives walked away.
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White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that Trump will be offering "specific governing principles" for a tax plan along with indications of what new rates would be but that a complete proposal probably won't be ready until June.
Mulvaney said on the Fox News Sunday program that the administration hasn't decided whether its plan will be revenue neutral, which would be needed to meet the criteria set by lawmakers to make tax changes permanent, or add to the deficit.
Mnuchin has signaled previously that the administration is more concerned about spurring economic growth and job creation than with the effect on government revenue.
He said Monday that Trump is "very determined" that the U.S. can achieve sustained economic growth of 3 percent or greater, which would pay for the tax cuts along with "trillions of dollars" brought in from offshore havens.
"The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth," Mnuchin said.
Mnuchin told reporters Monday that Trump's principles will include a "middle-income tax cut," "simplification" of the code so most Americans can file taxes "on a postcard" and to "make business taxes competitive."
The president likely won't include a contentious border-adjusted tax that Ryan has backed, a senior administration official said last week.
"Some principles to guide the discussion will be useful," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist who leads the American Action Forum. He said an active push by the White House is critical to success: "I think they're behind schedule, honestly, but they're not too late."
The "threshold question," he said, is whether the principles point toward tax "reform" that's revenue neutral and therefore permanent, or whether it's about tax "cuts" that sunset after 10 years like the George W. Bush tax cuts.
While White House and Congressional staff have been talking since the transition about a tax plan, today's meeting will be the first between Republican Congressional leadership and the key figures driving tax reform in the White House, one Congressional official said.
Brady has said House Republican leaders intend to advance tax legislation in committee this spring, based on the Ryan-backed blueprint Republicans released in June 2016.
That could be a source of tension, depending on what the White House proposes.
"The House blueprint is about tax reform," Holtz-Eakin said. "Certainly when the president campaigned his proposals were for tax cuts, corporate and individual."
A Section on 04/25/2017